Green Mountain College evolves toward environmentalism

Nov. 20, 2011

Ben Dube prepares the oxen at Green Mountain College for an oxen steering class at the Poultney school on Wednesday Nov. 9, 2011. Green Mountain College runs a small farm on campus offering hands-on courses for students. / EMILY McMANAMY, Free Press

Related Links

POULTNEY — Sustainability has become a major focus for higher education institutions across the country, but at Green Mountain College in Poultney, it’s something more: It’s a brand.

Environmental themes infuse all the courses in the general-education curriculum, from English to math and chemistry. Student fees feed a green fund that subsidizes environmental projects and research. The campus includes a 22-acre, oxen-tilled farm that supplies a portion of the vegetables, eggs and meat consumed in the dining hall. Last year, the college ranked No. 1 in the country on the Sierra Club’s list of “coolest schools,” based on various sustainability measures.

Part of what sets the college apart is its aggressive effort to reduce its carbon footprint. A charter member of the American College and University Presidents’ Climate Commitment, which sets a long-term target of climate neutrality for more than 600 institutions nationwide, Green Mountain College was one of the first to claim that the goal has been achieved, this year, thanks largely to the college’s investment in a new biomass plant and the purchase of credits for renewably sourced electricity.

“We’re a really good example of how to get to climate neutrality in a holistic way,” said Paul Fonteyn, college president and a plant ecologist by profession. “Our goal is that every student who graduates will have a full appreciation of social and environmental sustainability.”

The idea is that students will develop that appreciation by in studying their chosen disciplines, he added.

“I want our philosophy majors to be philosophy majors and our English majors to be English majors,” Fonteyn said. “The environment is going to be the No. 1 challenge for the world. I think it is now.”

Brand in the making

Founded in 1834 by the Methodist Church, Green Mountain College passed through various incarnations — coeducational, women-only, two-year, four-year — before it emerged in 1974 in its current form: a four-year liberal arts college for men and women.

By the mid-1990s, as faculty member Steven Letendre tells it, “The college was doing OK, but it didn’t have a clear mission.”

Enter Thomas L. Benson, who was inaugurated as president in 1995 and set in motion a deliberative process that resulted in a program called environmental liberal arts.

“It took four years to get it up and running,” said Bill Throop, provost, who joined the faculty in 1996 with a background in environmental philosophy. In the general-education curriculum — 40 credits over four years — themes of environmental and social sustainability are interwoven in all the required courses. So, an English course syllabus might include Thoreau. A math course might have students solving problems involving carbon-dioxide emissions.

Chris Donovan, who entered college after running what he called “a sustainable landscaping company” near Boston, said sustainability was a key criterion in deciding where to go to school.

“This one stood out,” he said of Green Mountain College. Now he’s a junior majoring in sustainable business and tutoring students enrolled in Quantitative Environmental Analysis, “a more exciting way to say ‘math.’”

Mark Thiong’o, a senior majoring in business and environmental management, came to Poultney from Kenya, he said, because “I wanted to go to a small college that embraces my values.”

The college enrolls about 800 students and accepts 96 percent of its undergraduate applicants. Recruitment over the past few years has focused on higher achieving students, Throop said.

“Our average SAT scores have increased 120 points in the last five years, and we have adjusted the curriculum accordingly,” he said. Increased rigor did not sit well with all students, and just 57 percent of the ’09 entering class returned in 2010, down from 70 percent the year before. The six-year graduation rate as of 2010 was 47 percent, according to federal education statistics, about 10 percentiles below the national average.

“We are very confident that our enrollment will continue to grow because of the synergist relationship between our brand and admissions and retention,” Throop wrote in an email. “Sixty-nine percent of college-bound students say the environment is a critical element in selecting a college and GMC is on the leading edge of this change.”

Students were integrally involved in developing the college’s climate action plan that is required by the presidents’ climate commitment, and at least nine courses were engaged in the planning process.

Each signatory to the presidents’ climate commitment is expected to develop a greenhouse-gas-emissions inventory and a plan for achieving net-zero emissions by some future date. College strategies vary widely — most include mixtures of efficiencies, alternative-energy use and purchase of offset-credits — but typically the target date is a decade or more away.

Green Mountain College (2011) and Middlebury College (2016) are on the early side, and in each case, a new biomass plant is a key part of the emissions-reduction scheme. At both schools, wood chips have replaced oil as the primary fuel to heat the campus.

Another important part of Green Mountain College’s strategy is purchasing campus electricity from Central Vermont Public Service’s “cow power” methane-generation program, which qualifies for emissions offsets.

Green Mountain College’s $5.8 million biomass plant, designed to provide 85 percent of the school’s heat and 20 percent of its electricity, is expected to reduce the campus’ stationary-source emissions by more than 80 percent. That assumes, however, that biomass is a carbon-neutral technology — in other words, that the burning of a renewable resource generates zero net emissions. That assumption increasingly has come under challenge during the past few years as carbon accounting practices receive closer scrutiny.

The climate-neutral question

Carbon dioxide is the principal gas that’s believed to contribute to global warming. Burning wood sends carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, just as burning coal or fuel oil does. Yet wood-burning emissions aren’t counted as part of an institution’s net carbon output, according to the Climate Registry accounting system used by the presidents’ climate commitment. That’s because living trees, which absorb carbon dioxide, are presumed to compensate for those emissions.

If the burned trees aren’t replaced, however, the presumption of “neutrality” doesn’t make sense and amounts to “an accounting error,” many scientists have pointed out.

“Replacement of fossil fuels with bioenergy does not directly stop carbon dioxide emissions from tailpipes or smokestacks,” stated a 2010 letter to congressional leaders signed by 90 U.S. scientists. The signers were concerned about how carbon accounting would figure in to federal climate-change legislation.

“Although fossil fuel emissions are reduced or eliminated, the combustion of biomass replaces fossil emissions with its own emissions (which may even be higher per unit of energy because of the lower energy to carbon ratio of biomass),” the letter continued. “Bioenergy can reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide if land and plants are managed to take up additional carbon dioxide beyond what they would absorb without bioenergy.”

A September report by the European Environment Agency Scientific Committee made a similar point:

“It is widely assumed that biomass combustion would be inherently carbon neutral because it only releases carbon taken from the atmosphere during plant growth. However, this assumption is not correct. ... If bioenergy production replaces forests, reduces forest stocks or reduces forest growth, which would otherwise sequester more carbon, it can increase the atmospheric carbon concentration.”

In other words, any claim of “climate neutrality” depends on how the forests that feed the wood-burning biomass plants are being managed. Both Middlebury College and Green Mountain College, which have made major investments in biomass plants ($12 million, in Middlebury’s case — slightly more than double the cost of Green Mountain College’s plant) contend their plants are fed by sustainable practices.

Jack Byrne, Middlebury’s sustainability director, wrote in an email that 75 percent of the chips the plant received last year came from lands with management plans and certifications that “give a reasonable assurance that forests are being well managed for their long-term health and many other benefits, like carbon absorption, that they provide.” He added Middlebury also is “exploring the feasibility of growing our own fuel on nearby farmland owned by the College which we hope will eventually allow us to use less from forests ... and give us further control over the carbon neutrality equation.”

Similarly, Green Mountain College has launched an effort — called the Poultney Woodshed Project — that seeks to obtain wood chips from sustainably managed local forests.

“The biomass project substantially reduces the use of number six fuel oil, which was the College’s main fuel source until this year,” Fonteyn, the college president, said in a college news release. “As much as possible, we want to use woodchips from sustainably harvested local sources, which is environmentally friendly and helpful to the local economy.”

So, the biomass plant’s overall effect on actual forest growth doesn’t figure into the accounting system for the presidents’ climate commitment. And the carbon-neutral claim for the biomass plant comes with another big caveat: Emissions from the transportation and processing of the wood chips are not counted in the institution’s carbon profile.

By the common standards adopted by the presidents’ climate commitment, Green Mountain College appears to be in the vanguard of climate-control initiatives in higher education. But the college isn’t resting on that distinction, Fonteyn said.

“We’re not done,” he said. “Now we’re looking at becoming as efficient as we can be.”

That could mean more insulation in the dorms — which already have had their windows upgraded — and solar-heated hot water in the summer months.

Students reflect

The college library overlooks the college farm. Visible from a window on a recent afternoon were garden plots, greenhouses, free-range chickens and two oxen waiting to be harnessed.

Standing outside near the oxen was Kyle Newman, a freshman majoring in agriculture. He was awaiting a tutorial.

“We’re learning how to drive oxen to till fields, cut hay,” he said. He said he had learned the voice commands, and he found the experience of working with “4,000 pounds of animal” exhilarating.

The tutor arrived: Ben Dube, a senior majoring in sustainable agriculture who had spent the summer working on the farm and perfecting his oxen-driving skills. “We use them to plow, cultivate, spread manure,” Dube said. “We cut 10 acres of hay this summer.”

“It’s so great to be able to come out here and work with these guys,” Dube said, patting one of the oxen. “These guys don’t know anything about grades or things that stress me out. They teach me so much.”

Dube said he wasn’t too familiar with carbon accounting protocols, but he was clear about the long-term goal for the college’s agricultural operation: “fossil-fuel free farming.”

Across campus, as she came out of the dining hall, Ashley Jellen, a senior majoring in conservation biology, talked about the college’s educational approach.

“Every class — business, biology, English — is looking through an environmental lens,” she said. “That’s really good, because that’s the way the world is going now. It’s an essential viewpoint.”

It’s a viewpoint that Erin Burch, a senior on the women’s soccer team, has brought to athletics. As an environmental education major, she developed a game she called “Road to Sustainability” to get athletes and their coaches thinking about how they could be more environmentally responsible: using hand towels instead of paper towels, water bottles instead of plastic cups at games, cold water for laundry, shared buses for male and female teams.